I recently finished work on my Negotiated Study 1 (Neg 1) which was a music video for the band Portlights. I thought i’d do a blog post going into some of the details how how it all came together.
The video is made up of two main parts, a small narrative that runs throughout the video and some studio based work with the band on both a green screen and a plain black background.
The narrative that runs through it is about a guy and a girl, but the guy always just misses the girl making him unsure wether she is real or imaginary.
The name of the song is eclipse so when the band are on the green screen there is a eclipse happening in the background in the style of an old super 8 film projection. I wanted to try and keep that feel or similar throughout the whole video. Which I feel that I have done. I directed and produced the video with Nathan Stewart a student on the music technology course.
We spent one day in the television studio with the band and filmed on both a normal black background and on a green screen.
Most of the backgrounds I created in After Effects like the one that I have right at the beginning which is an old movie style countdown before the band start to play I have the audio that was taken straight from the cameras of what was going on at that moment before cutting to the audio track of the song as the band start to play.
Before
After
Before
After
Before
After
Above you can see the differences between the raw footage and once the footage had been worked on in After effects adding the background and colouring the footage. One problem that did appear when we did a test shot of the green screen before actually starting was that the floor in the studio was reflecting the green screen meaning that when it came to keying the shot the floor went partially see through. So I had to make a decision on wether to try and light the floor as well which would take more time and we were already running behind schedule or I could try and compensate for it in after effects. I decided that I would make a reflection of what ever was going to be on the background on the floor to compensate for the floor being slightly see through and I’m glad I did because I quite like the way it looks.
A Problem I only came across when in post production was that on the green screen we shot in to the corner for the maximum floor space meaning the floor line is angled and not straight so meaning that if I put the background straight it would look odd and just wouldn’t fit with the shot. To solve this problem I but I split the background in half and angled them so they looked right. It’s only a small thing but with out it the shots on the green screen would not look right.
There were some changes that I made to the shots that were filmed for the narrative. The Narrative was filmed over a two week period depending when the actors were free.
The changes I made were only small but I think they help to up the production value of the music video.
The first change I made was that I got rid of some branding on the side of a vending machines and just made the whole side of the machine black.
Before
After
The second thing I did was change the sign on the front of the building I did this to again up the production value slightly as the music video is going to be the official music video for the band I didn’t want the video to give any specific locations that can be easily noticed. I wanted the video to of been able to happen any where really.
Before After
After
The third thing I did was I edited out some people from the back of a shot as I wanted the park to look empty. I achieved this by taking a still image from the shot and used photoshop to get rid of the people. I then put the shot back in to after effects and had it over the top of the video.
Before
After
One of the biggest parts of post production involved the train station scene. The shot was not filmed on any green screen at all which looking back on it filming it on green screen would of made it a lot easier in the edit stage but not using green screen didn’t make it impossible just very time consuming when editing it.
Original Shot
This is the original shot that I filmed at a train station I then had to mask around the the guy in the foreground so that only he was on one layer
Masked Layer
I then placed the masked layer over the top of the original clip meaning that I can put something in between and the guy would still be on top. The train in the video is not a real one it is a high quality picture of a full train that I have put in between the two layers
Train added in
Then to give the effect that the train is going past quite vast I put a motion blur on it.
Motion Blur
To then give the impression that the girl has disappeared i then placed footage of the empty train station underneath the masked layer to create the illusion that the girl has disappeared.
Disappeared
You can watch the video here:
Portlights : http://www.portlightsmusic.com/
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